Following up on the teenager who refused to apologize for tweeting disparaging remarks about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback… Yahoo! News: Hundreds of people have left negative comments on Brownback’s Facebook Thanksgiving message. "The imperial Gov needs to go to the school, apologize to the assembled students and then apologize in person to the young lady," one person wrote. In a comment to...

Julie Sullivan isn’t angry with her daughter, Emma, for tweeting disparaging remarks about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback during a Youth in Government program last week in Topeka: “She was talking to 65 friends. And also it’s the speech they use today. It’s more attention grabbing. I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Gov. Brownback,...

If you enjoyed how Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, you may love what a group called Americans Elect is trying to do in 2012. The well-financed effort wants a “wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates,” but it looks more like hammering a “broken” political system and smashing it to smithereens. Americans Elect aims, not to create a new party, but hold a “convention...

New Scientist reports on the first contact lenses containing electronic displays. They’ve been put into the eyes of rabbits to prove they are safe for humans: The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays – like those seen in Terminator – could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails –...

EDITOR’s NOTE: This post should have been on top of TMV yesterday. So we’re displaying it on top today. On Saturday (Friday in most of the U.S.), New Zealanders head to the polls to vote in a general election (#nzelection) and on a referendum on New Zealand’s voting system. And there is a media blackout — social media as well as traditional media — from from midnight until 7pm on election...

It was a Veteran’s Day present to all Americans who carry a cellphone, issued with little fanfare and almost no mainstream media attention. On Nov. 11, 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern District of Texas made it clear that cellular telephone services cannot be compelled to share data that reveal location without seeing a warrant based on probable cause. When the government...

New International Report Shreds Japan’s Carefully Constructed Fukushima Scenario by John C.K. Daly Japan’s six reactor Fukushima Daichi nuclear complex has inadvertently become the world’s bell-weather poster child for the inherent risks of nuclear power ever since the 11 March Tohoku offshore earthquake, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, triggered a devastating tsunami that effectively...

If you run a political site — such as a PAC or a campaign for a person or issue — then you should not be able to hide who you are in the WhoIs database. In other words, any political action site — a PAC or a site advocating for or against a person or an issue — should contain information about the organization or person who is running the website in a Whois lookup. If you agree with me,...

by WALTER BRASCH For a few hours on the afternoon of Nov. 1, the people of southern California were scared by initial reports of an alert at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. An “alert” is the second of four warning levels. Workers first detected an ammonia leak in a water purification system about 3 p.m. Ammonia, when mixed into air, is toxic. The 30 gallons of ammonia were caught in a holding...

I’ve just spent a week in that earlier America you love so much and, while the absence of politicians was a blessing, I would not recommend living in cold semi-darkness, feebly powered by an emergency generator that eats $100 a day of propane and engine oil (if you can get a delivery) without providing Internet, cable or phone service and, in many cases, enough juice to run an electric range. Even this weekend,...

Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

If Americans were educated in Classical Logic and Fallacies, they would automatically laugh at any assertion that one = all or that some = many (or most). (Still, ask American Muslims how prevalent that thinking is in actual practice.) They like to be in America.. That is the entire extent of my commentary on the astonishingly vile Occupy Wall Street coverage that’s being foisted off on a seemingly-hypnotized...

Driving through Tennessee in the outback, and there is plenty outback to Tennessee, one sees tiny shotgun shacks with tiny side yards planted in tobacco. Driveways ripped out, if ever existing, all aerable land, no matter how small, planted with sentinels of tobacco, yellow, green, brown, depending on time of year. One sees too that tobacco more or less takes care of itself til ready to harvest, so the poor...

I had originally planned to write this for Halloween, the day that UNESCO or WHO, or one of them acronyms calculates that the world population will reach seven billion. But though the papers have jumped the gun all week, prisoner of the zeitgeist that I am, I have held on until today. Happy Halloween. (All seven billion of you.) SEVEN BILLION, kiddies: Seven billion kiddies. We have overgrazed our forage, we...

And you can bet safety is the more likely loser. AP says that one out of every five Americans lives in a community that pays a for-profit company to install and operate cameras that record traffic violations. That’s 700 communities in nearly half the states have for-profit deals. USA Today: Some contracts restrict police from doing things like lengthening the yellow signal and leave taxpayers holding...

All In The Name Of Copyright Protection Two years ago, the Obama Administration, despite the behest of moneyed interests in Hollywood, was unable to insert language into an international treaty that would have required ISPs to remove content that allegedly infringed on copyright: no evidence or trial required. On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced legislation (H.R. 3261) advanced by Hollywood...

Kathy Gill points to RSAnimate on the book I’m reading now, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World… In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA’s free...

The tagline on the new Air Force ad, “It’s not science fiction. It’s what we do every day.” Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman, say what? [T]he C-17s swoop over a breaking bridge to evacuate some poor souls in the middle of an emergency. So far, so good. But then the C-17 engines rotate into a vertical position. (Nope.) The behemoth of a plane — which is 174 feet long and can...

Here’s another study — this one conducted by global warming skeptics — that global warming skeptics will try to ignore and discredit (who cares if those who agree with them conducted the study? Who cares if the Koch brothers money was involved in funding it? Our politics is now all around making assertions and cherry picking). From Newsy:

From Technology Review: Your car may soon be able to warn you if your blood sugar dips, alert you to high pollen counts, and remind you to take your medication. Ford demonstrated the new in-car technology—currently a research project—this week at the Wireless Health 2011 conference in La Jolla, California. Many carmakers see a big opportunity in adding new functionality to the computers built into...

What is at the root of what’s wrong with our economy and our civil society? Weaving the issue of the U.S. death penalty into the global financial crisis, columnist Guido Rossi of Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore is unequivocal: our system of ‘financial capitalism’ has slowly but surely eaten away at the fabric of society, which demands protecting the rights of not only the powerful and well-connected,...

Call it propaganda or call it delusion, but Tehran is crowing about not only predicting Occupy Wall Street and allied groups, but says it considers itself primarily responsible for all the unrest – Eastern and Western – since the Arab Spring began. So could it be that the protests which began in New York on September 17 and have now spread across the developed world reflect a yearning to reject...

Is Steve Jobs and the success he engendered the perfect demonstration of how far off track the global financial system has gotten? According to columnist León Bendesky of Mexico’s La Jornada, innovation and creating new products that consitute progress requires the availablity of credit, an element of buisiness that banks have rejected in favor of sophisticated financial instruments that generate little...

Harvard Med Surgical Oncologist Ramzi Amri thinks so: I have done 1.5 years of research on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs and have some strong opinions on his case, not only as an admirer of his work, but also as a cancer researcher who has the impression that his disease course has been far from optimal. Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment...

What is it about mainland China that prevents the emergence of innovators like Steve Jobs? While in the West it seems obvious that a lack of free speech, free expression and free association puts China at a disadvantage, this editorial from Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po shows that Beijing still has a way to go before it accepts that in order to unleash the creative power of its people, it will have to loosen...